AMD's next-generation flagship graphics card, the Radeon R9 290X, could strike a US $599.99 (or 499.99€, £399.99 before taxes) price-point, turning up the heat on the more expensive offerings by NVIDIA - GeForce GTX 780 and GTX TITAN. The card should be available from mid-October. Based on the new 28 nm "Hawaii" silicon, the card is expected to feature 2,816 GCN stream processors, spread across 44 SIMDs (11 computing units). Other specifications include 172 TMUs, 44 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory, which likely achieves its >300 GB/s memory bandwidth with a 5.00 GHz memory clock. The company is expected to launch 6 GB variants of the card a little later.

I want to see some real benchmarks. The lack of a 512-bit bus probably means that it doesn't need it. I would like to think that AMD's EEs know what they're doing, at least more so then everyone posting here so I would stop getting bent out of shape over it. It's a decent price point that I would consider but that completely depends on benchmarks.

Retail price is reasonable, only a littler more than the $549 of the 7970, and the 7970 was much faster than any Nvidia card at the time of release. Nvidia's high pricing on Titan and the 780 is dragging the price up it seems.

Retail price might not be the whole story though, depending on availability, the stores could wack on an early adopter tax, another $50-$80 if demand is more than supply. It happened with the 7970 for the first couple of months. Hopefully there is plenty of stock, so I can get one for $599.

R290 X unfortunately I cannot release pricing or specification info yet, but price wise its similar to GTX 780 but slightly faster, right now, of course AMD could change the launch price at any time

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R270 is HD 7950 re-boxed and these shall be reference design in beginning and prices from £170 region, so same as our lowest price 7950's. So OcUK is already at the new price, the newly boxed R270's will arrive middle-end October.

R280X is the HD 7970 GHz re-boxed and these shall be reference design in beginning and prices shall be around £230 region, so same again as our lowest priced 7970's. This makes our current Asus 7970's a bargain as they are TOP and Platinum cards, the equivalent of these in R280 X shall be in the £250-£300 region and available in their R280 X packaging around end of October.

It's a 512-bit bus, so 4GB makes sense. I don't understand how they will put 6GB on a 512-bit bus though. Maybe reduce the bus width to 384-bit and clock it at 7GHz to match the bandwidth of the 512-bit bus?